6 ms·

Wait, what? What does this show? The link goes to an example. The front page of the site says the following, whish doesn't help much: The computer world is no

Wait, what? What does this show? The link goes to an example. The front page of the site says the following, whish doesn't help much: The computer world is not just technicality and razzle-dazzle. It is a continual war over software politics and paradigms. With ideas which are still radical, WE FIGHT ON. We hope for vindication, the last laugh, and recognition as an additional standard-- electronic documents with visible connections. We propose a new kind of writing-- PARALLEL PAGES, VISIBLY CONNECTED.

devd00d 4y ago
Yeah, I dont get it either.
- patrec 4y ago
  Imagine web had actual support for hypertext. Then you couldn't just "hotlink" images, but also "hotlink" (i.e. natively quote, and annotate) textual content, with arbitrary start and end-points. As it is, html can't can't even express the equivalent of margin notes or footnotes, because it has some braindamaged ideas about inline vs block elements and the former can't contain the latter (they changed the nomenclature, but I'm pretty sure the limitation remains).
  - tannhaeuser 4y ago
    SGML, the meta-language on which HTML is based, has entities ie text expansion variables bound to the content of external resources accessed via URLs or file names. So HTML itself doesn't need such mechanisms if it's understood that general markup facilities of SGML are available (which however isn't the case with browsers). XML (XInclude) attempted to establish more granular inclusion of external document fragments via XPath, but failed on the web. Even if HTML had transclusion, what would the use case look like? HTML as a markup vocabulary was introduced for casual academic publishing at CERN, reusing folklore SGML markup elements that were already widely used at the time. You can argue that HTML has been effectively stagnant while everything around it (CSS and JS) was changed ad absurdum to cater for HTML's limitations, but still in an academic setting, you'll use inline citations or block quotes with references to sources, just as HTML is providing.
  - davidy123 4y ago
    You can do all this with the mostly ignored part of Fielding's REST, HATEOAS. Xanadu has a lot of interesting ideas and Nelson is a visionary, though the idea to visually link works just doesn't work. However, transclusion is an important idea, that is critical for Wikipedia's style of evolution, and will be important as Wikidata and other linked data (semantic web) applications get off the ground. However, the vast majority of the web consists of cheap short cut web sites that aren't much different than dial up systems. AKA start up money grabbing culture trying to carve up every little idea into a unicorn. And once they start carving things up, they sure don't want to collapse it and help create the semantic web, except privately behind the scenes, in creepy surveillance capitalist and other centralizing projects.
  - Xanni 4y ago
    Not just text, either. Other media formats as well, though text was always the first format supported.
sedatk 4y ago
Xanadu was the original project in which the term "hypertext" was coined. It's the primary influence over all hypertext things, including HTML. Its intended use was "directly embedded documents" instead of clicking through links. So, this web site just revives that original idea. I agree that its novelty over web model is still questionable, but that's how significant it is.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
  >It's the primary influence over all hypertext things, including HTML Is it? Was Tim Berners-Lee influences by Project Xanadu? Was he aware at all?
  - themadturk 4y ago
    Ted Nelson was mentioned specifically in his original proposal document, so I would say it had some influence.
  - LeonB 4y ago
    He was certainly influenced by Ted Nelson and I’d be shocked if he had no awareness of this. He’d have to have been completely naive about the field he was working in, and I don’t think he was naive.
  - tannhaeuser 4y ago
    You can check yourself by reading TBL's first WWW site [1]. In essence, Ted Nelson (and Vannevar Bush) are referenced in the "History" section, and also for coining the term "Hypertext", but not from the "Technical" [2] and "Standards" [3] sections. [1]: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html [2]: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Technical.html http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Technical.html [3]: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/Standards/Overview.html http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/Standards/Overview.html
- kabes 4y ago
  I would argue that memex is the primary influence over all hypertext things. The concept was around before Xanadu.
chipotle_coyote 4y ago
It's a fascinating dead end in the history of hypertext. Ted Nelson has always come across to me as either 51% visionary and 49% crackpot, or the other way 'round. Technically, Xanadu's bidirectional links and document transclusion (e.g., not just including links but whole sections of other web pages in yours) are really interesting. From a copyright standpoint, they're kind of a mess, and an integral idea of Xanadu is essentially being able to make links and embedded microdocuments require micropayments for usage and/or inclusion, which sounds like the kind of thing that people who don't like libertarians use to parody libertarian ideas. And, from a practical standpoint, they've just never gone anywhere -- as far as I can tell, in no small part because Mr. Nelson is apparently impossible to work with. Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15269827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15269827 A famous (and infamous) article, "The Curse of Xanadu", on "the longest-running vaporware project in the history of computing, a 30-year saga of rabid prototyping and heart-slashing despair" (now closer to 50 years and counting): https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/ https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/ I don't think I'd actually clicked through and seen this demo before, though, which adds some interesting new objections to it on my end -- I find the user experience here ugly and cryptic. I'm sure a much nicer one with these ideas could be made, but it seems oddly telling that Xanadu's proponents think this -- and the Xanadu web site in general -- are great ways to sell the ideas.
- woleium 4y ago
  So all in all quite like the sprawling mansion of the same name from the Citizen Kaine film then?
  - janv 4y ago
    More like Coleridge's unfinished poem Kubla Khan[0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubla_Khan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubla_Khan
- spc476 4y ago
  As a demo, I can forgive ugly and being a bit cryptic. It's the ramifications that get me. Okay, in the main document, you have a transclusion link to the King James Bible (Genesis 1:1-3). But one of the main points of Xanadu is the bidirectional links, so when you switch to reading the King James Bible, you should also see bidirectional links not only to the document you were just reading ("Xanadoc"), but every other link to the King James Bible in Xanalogical space, and past a few dozen such links, things will get incredibly messy (and a "missed opportunity"---one of the sides documents actually quotes one of the other side documents, yet there's no link).
asoneth 4y ago
One thing to keep in mind is that Project Xanadu predates the web by a decade or so. Whereas the web settled on simple unidirectional links embedded in linear text documents, Ted Nelson's Xanadu was aiming for bidirectional transclusion and nonlinear documents ("zippered lists"). Reading old papers from Nelson, Engelbart, or Bush is a lot of fun, though it can sometimes take a little work to get into a pre-internet headspace. I don't read very many authors these days who are attempting to rethink fundamental computer interface concepts like that, though there are a few.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

devd00d 4y ago

Yeah, I dont get it either.

patrec 4y ago
Imagine web had actual support for hypertext. Then you couldn't just "hotlink" images, but also "hotlink" (i.e. natively quote, and annotate) textual content, with arbitrary start and end-points. As it is, html can't can't even express the equivalent of margin notes or footnotes, because it has some braindamaged ideas about inline vs block elements and the former can't contain the latter (they changed the nomenclature, but I'm pretty sure the limitation remains).
- tannhaeuser 4y ago
  SGML, the meta-language on which HTML is based, has entities ie text expansion variables bound to the content of external resources accessed via URLs or file names. So HTML itself doesn't need such mechanisms if it's understood that general markup facilities of SGML are available (which however isn't the case with browsers). XML (XInclude) attempted to establish more granular inclusion of external document fragments via XPath, but failed on the web. Even if HTML had transclusion, what would the use case look like? HTML as a markup vocabulary was introduced for casual academic publishing at CERN, reusing folklore SGML markup elements that were already widely used at the time. You can argue that HTML has been effectively stagnant while everything around it (CSS and JS) was changed ad absurdum to cater for HTML's limitations, but still in an academic setting, you'll use inline citations or block quotes with references to sources, just as HTML is providing.
- davidy123 4y ago
  You can do all this with the mostly ignored part of Fielding's REST, HATEOAS. Xanadu has a lot of interesting ideas and Nelson is a visionary, though the idea to visually link works just doesn't work. However, transclusion is an important idea, that is critical for Wikipedia's style of evolution, and will be important as Wikidata and other linked data (semantic web) applications get off the ground. However, the vast majority of the web consists of cheap short cut web sites that aren't much different than dial up systems. AKA start up money grabbing culture trying to carve up every little idea into a unicorn. And once they start carving things up, they sure don't want to collapse it and help create the semantic web, except privately behind the scenes, in creepy surveillance capitalist and other centralizing projects.
- Xanni 4y ago
  Not just text, either. Other media formats as well, though text was always the first format supported.

sedatk 4y ago

Xanadu was the original project in which the term "hypertext" was coined. It's the primary influence over all hypertext things, including HTML. Its intended use was "directly embedded documents" instead of clicking through links. So, this web site just revives that original idea. I agree that its novelty over web model is still questionable, but that's how significant it is.

aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
>It's the primary influence over all hypertext things, including HTML Is it? Was Tim Berners-Lee influences by Project Xanadu? Was he aware at all?
- themadturk 4y ago
  Ted Nelson was mentioned specifically in his original proposal document, so I would say it had some influence.
- LeonB 4y ago
  He was certainly influenced by Ted Nelson and I’d be shocked if he had no awareness of this. He’d have to have been completely naive about the field he was working in, and I don’t think he was naive.
- tannhaeuser 4y ago
  You can check yourself by reading TBL's first WWW site [1]. In essence, Ted Nelson (and Vannevar Bush) are referenced in the "History" section, and also for coining the term "Hypertext", but not from the "Technical" [2] and "Standards" [3] sections. [1]: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html [2]: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Technical.html http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/Technical.html [3]: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/Standards/Overview.html http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/Standards/Overview.html
kabes 4y ago
I would argue that memex is the primary influence over all hypertext things. The concept was around before Xanadu.

chipotle_coyote 4y ago

It's a fascinating dead end in the history of hypertext. Ted Nelson has always come across to me as either 51% visionary and 49% crackpot, or the other way 'round. Technically, Xanadu's bidirectional links and document transclusion (e.g., not just including links but whole sections of other web pages in yours) are really interesting. From a copyright standpoint, they're kind of a mess, and an integral idea of Xanadu is essentially being able to make links and embedded microdocuments require micropayments for usage and/or inclusion, which sounds like the kind of thing that people who don't like libertarians use to parody libertarian ideas. And, from a practical standpoint, they've just never gone anywhere -- as far as I can tell, in no small part because Mr. Nelson is apparently impossible to work with. Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15269827 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15269827 A famous (and infamous) article, "The Curse of Xanadu", on "the longest-running vaporware project in the history of computing, a 30-year saga of rabid prototyping and heart-slashing despair" (now closer to 50 years and counting): https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/ https://www.wired.com/1995/06/xanadu/ I don't think I'd actually clicked through and seen this demo before, though, which adds some interesting new objections to it on my end -- I find the user experience here ugly and cryptic. I'm sure a much nicer one with these ideas could be made, but it seems oddly telling that Xanadu's proponents think this -- and the Xanadu web site in general -- are great ways to sell the ideas.

woleium 4y ago
So all in all quite like the sprawling mansion of the same name from the Citizen Kaine film then?
- janv 4y ago
  More like Coleridge's unfinished poem Kubla Khan[0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubla_Khan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kubla_Khan
spc476 4y ago
As a demo, I can forgive ugly and being a bit cryptic. It's the ramifications that get me. Okay, in the main document, you have a transclusion link to the King James Bible (Genesis 1:1-3). But one of the main points of Xanadu is the bidirectional links, so when you switch to reading the King James Bible, you should also see bidirectional links not only to the document you were just reading ("Xanadoc"), but every other link to the King James Bible in Xanalogical space, and past a few dozen such links, things will get incredibly messy (and a "missed opportunity"---one of the sides documents actually quotes one of the other side documents, yet there's no link).

asoneth 4y ago

One thing to keep in mind is that Project Xanadu predates the web by a decade or so. Whereas the web settled on simple unidirectional links embedded in linear text documents, Ted Nelson's Xanadu was aiming for bidirectional transclusion and nonlinear documents ("zippered lists"). Reading old papers from Nelson, Engelbart, or Bush is a lot of fun, though it can sometimes take a little work to get into a pre-internet headspace. I don't read very many authors these days who are attempting to rethink fundamental computer interface concepts like that, though there are a few.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]